1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the use of privacy policies in computer-based on-line commerce in which sellers and buyers of goods or services are linked via an electronic marketplace where deals are negotiated and consummated.
2. Description of the Related Art
As networks of linked computers become an increasingly more prevalent concept in everyday life, on-line interactions between buyers and sellers have become commonplace. Transactions between a business and an individual consumer are referred to as business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions and transactions between businesses (e.g., the sale of goods from a manufacturer to a wholesaler who uses the purchased goods to eventually sell a product on the retail level) are referred to as business-to-business (B2B) transactions.
As a result of this increased use of networked computers to transact business, the concept of the electronic marketplace, referred to herein as the “E-marketplace,” has emerged and become a standard form of conducting these business transactions. For a variety of reasons, the intermediary function provided by the E-marketplace is now an everyday part of transactional commerce.
On the consumer end, E-commerce sites such as E-Bay, half.com, Ubid.com, and AuctionPort.com provide an E-marketplace serving as a central location for negotiation of sales and/or auctions of products or services from a seller to a consumer (e.g., bidders). Likewise, B2B sellers provide a similar intermediary service for business transactions between businesses.
A significant trade off for enjoying the convenience of e-commerce is the need to submit to a semi-public forum what would typically be considered private information. For example, to do business on an e-commerce site, it is usually necessary to provide any or all of the following: name, address, telephone number, email address, credit card numbers, demographic information and the like. For B2B, this information might include banking information, pricing information, inventory information, and personal information pertaining to company contacts. This quite naturally concerns users of e-commerce since once submitted to the e-commerce site, the user loses control of the use of the information by others. This invariably stops some users from utilizing e-commerce sites to make purchases, despite the convenience that they offer.
As a result of the above problems, steps have been taken to develop methods for protecting the privacy of e-commerce users while allowing the e-commerce sites to function. As an example, the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium and has emerged as an industry standard providing a simple, automated way for users to gain more control over the use of personal information on websites that they visit. P3P is a standardized set of multiple-choice questions, covering all the major aspects of a website's privacy policies. Taken together, they present a clear snapshot of how a site claims to handle personal information about its users. P3P-enabled websites make this information available in a standard, machine-readable format. P3P-enabled browsers can “read” this snapshot automatically and compare it to the consumer's own set of privacy preferences. P3P enhances a user's control by putting privacy policies where users can find them, in a form users can understand, and most importantly, enables users to act on what they see.
While functioning adequately, use of P3P or other systems to specify privacy information in an E-marketplace can be quite cumbersome. A declaration of a privacy policy that characterizes an entire particular marketplace is difficult to identify and to express. An E-marketplace administrator can require all participants to adhere to one particular privacy policy, either overall or even on a section-by-section basis of the marketplace (e.g., all electronics vendors adhere to one privacy policy, all service providers adhere to another privacy policy, etc.), but requiring this adherence will limit the number of willing seller participants. Similarly, the marketplace portal could invoke a privacy statement that only applies to the portal itself, but not to the individual participants available via the portal. This would likely limit the number of potential buyers using the portal, since there would be no guarantee that the portal participants would respect the buyers' privacy needs. The use of this information will depend on the individual privacy policy of the parties involved in the transaction, and at each juncture in the transaction, the consumer's set of privacy preferences will have to be compared with those of each party to the transaction, an annoying and time-consuming process.
The P3P working group proposed a recommendation that an SSL (secure sockets layer) be utilized to ensure the integrity of a P3P policy being transmitted from one party to another. The effect of using an SSL is that the owner of the SSL certificate used to secure the TCP/IP connection essentially vouches for the integrity of the policy. This works acceptably for connections between two parties. However, in portal and multi-hosting environments such as an E-marketplace, where the E-marketplace acts in a middle-man capacity, the integrity can only be vouched for as between a participant and the middle-man (the E-marketplace). Thus, an unscrupulous E-marketplace administration could receive the P3P policy over the SSL, modify it, and send it along to others. Likewise, an unscrupulous vendor could deny the terms of the policy as being valid (after having presented the terms to the E-marketplace in the hope of drumming up business), since the policy cannot be directly tied to the vendor.